138 society. He approached words with cau- tion and deep respect. Certain words ap- peared to make him almost physically ill and were instantly stamped out, but when someone handed him words strung together in graceful sentences that touched his mind and heart he experi- enced the joy that many feel when they hear a Bach sonata. Somehow, byen- couraging his writers to feel free, to be bold and truthful, he brought them to the peak of their powers. I worked with him from 1939 until 1987, often from the initial proposal of an idea (he grasped ideas with the speed of light) through the cherished phone call of acceptance and through galley and page proofs. These sessions were mostly brief and businesslike: a word here, a nu- ance there, a fact to be further clarified. But there is one evening in the late for- ties that is indelibly impressed on my mind. I had written a long report on a visit to the Argentina of Juan Perón. The narrative ended with Señor Perón unex- pectedly introducing me, as he opened elegant French doors in the Presidential palace in Buenos Aires, to Evita Perón. I wrote that I took her hand and found it "stone cold." Shawn and I were going over the proof. The time was around 10 P.M. He became agitated. " 'Stone ld ' " h O d " . h h " co, e Sill , requITes a yp en. I became agitated. "Put a hyphen there and you spoil the ending," I said. "That hyphen would be ruinous." "Perhaps you had better sit outside my office and cool off:" he said. "I'll go on with my other work." I took a seat outside his office. From time to time, he would stick his head out and say, "Have you changed your mind?" "N 0 hyphen," I replied. "Absolutely no hyphen." I was quite worked up over the hyphen. Sometime around two-thirty in the morning, Shawn said, wearily, "All right. No hyphen. But you are wrong." We remained dear friends, hyphen or no hyphen, to the end. - PHIUP HAMBURGER W EN Shawn, then managing edi- tor, hired me, in June, 1942, the day after I graduated from Swarthmore, he explained that I was the first woman to join the staff as a Talk of the Town re- porter. When Harold Ross also men- tioned this distinction to me, it was in a grumbling voice; later, he adapted nicely. The Second World War was going on THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 1992/JANUARY 4,1993 by then, of course, and any men hired were likely to be drafted, so the move had been forced on Ross. I had come along at a lucky moment Shawn made it clear that the development suited him fine. There were perhaps only four or five women regularly in the office in those days. Ross, for example, had always had men secretaries. He eXplained that women were forever quarrelling among themselves. When I told this to Shawn, he laughed out loud-not something I heard him do often. I have heard that the transition from calling him Mr. Shawn to calling him Bill was a rather stately process, but this was not my experience. Sometime in 1945, I be- came Andy, and the editorial notes were signed "Love, Bill." While I was report- ing from Europe after the war ended, and we communicated with our offices by a system aùled Press WIfeless, it caused a small stir when the dispatches from The New Yorker came back signed "Love, Bill." Shawn's reputation as a formal person was well known even then I didn't think of it as important-just an affectionate gesture from a much older editor It was some time before I realized that when I met him he was thirty-four years old and that the magazine was only seventeen years old-just begun, really. I'm not sure how he would feel about all the edi- torials and headlines that used the word "gentle" to describe him. When he was challenged (especially by someone who was not a writer), his voice could be steely and his expression very angry. He was a strong and powerfi.ù man, and he never forgot it. - ANDY LOGAN M R. SHAWN was seventy-four when I arrived at The New Yorker, and I was twenty-one, but in most of the ways that mattered he was the younger man. The era, the city, and the profes- sion seemed to demand cynicism, but he was uninfected. I started work in the early summer, and one of two Talk-story ideas I first sent him was for a piece on the Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon, a celebrity event I suppose I wanted to ridicule. He turned that proposal down flat, but encouraged the other one-a story about a completely obscure resident of the Bronx who worked in the welfare office and rose each morning at one to write telegraphic letters to the editors of scores of newspapers advocating every- thing from growing ivy on skyscrapers in an effort to reduce air pollution to requir- ing Russian wives for American Presi- den ts in order to decrease the risk of nuclear war. I remember Mr. Shawn's delight with the subject of that piece: when I first read him some of the man's letters, he opened his lips in an 0 and shook his head happily back and forth, as if to say, absolutely without irony, 'Wonders never cease " I saw the same expression hundreds of other times, most reliably when I was telling him about people whose distinction was not careers, not power, but some type of pure and marvellous obsession. There was the young man who spent every day excavat- ing the remains of the city's first subway tunnel, underneath Adantic Avenue in Brooklyn. And the fellow who had built a Hovercraft in the basement of his house so he could circumnavigate Man- hattan. No other magazine would ever have printed the stories; they'd have been rejected not because they were contro- versial but because they weren't. The more I got to know him, the more I realized the burdens he carried: deep worry about keeping his staff of writers content and productive; the strain of coping with a decade that politically and culturally and morally was repudiat- ing much of what he believed in. But his nearly physical joy in a good Talk idea- in the Brooklyn dentist who suddenly became Grenada's Ambassador to the United Nations, in the intricacies of the Aroma Disc System-never faded. Chronicling such subjects was his great pleasure. Almost everything else in his magazine was weightier, and probably accounted for more of his reputation, but I think that for Mr. Shawn a Talk story was the loveliest thing in journalism. - BILL McKIBBEN I THINK it was dunng my third week at the magazine that I tripped and fell down the worn, uneven old stairs that connected the nineteenth and twentieth floors near Mr. Shawn's office in our old building. As it happened, I was carryIng several open bottles of Coke at the tIme, and about halfway down the stairs I col- lided with Mr. Shawn, spilling Coke all over him and somehow getting his fin- gers entangled in my Coke-sodden hair. It is impossible to convey the full extent of my horror at that moment. The sound of the bottles clattering down the stairs and our collision immediately drew ev- erybody out of the nearby offices, and af- ter a moment of stunned silence many